Item: McCain’s campaign puts out a substance-free anti-Obama commercial which shows Obama’s head superimposed on the presidents’ heads at Mt. Rushmore and on the dollar bill. Obama responds with a single line in a longer speech, in which he remarks that the McCain camp is reminding voters that he, Obama, doesn’t look like the other presidents on the dollar bill. Foul! cries the McCain campaign. Dealing the race card “from the bottom of the deck”!
Item: The McCain campaign puts out a commercial mocking Obama as a celebrity. This one’s a little less substance-free; while the other one took aim at Obama for a redesigned seal used at a single campaign event, this one has an actual policy criticism of Obama: Obama opposes offshore oil drilling, offshore oil drilling is good, therefore Obama shouldn’t be president. Most of the 32 seconds of the commercial, though, are taken up by displaying crowds cheering Obama, and suggesting that these cheering crowds are in themselves somehow a bad thing, and a reason to beware. They mean that Obama is a big old slut celebrity like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.
At this point, in a reaction that totally shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with recent political history, Obama supporters raise the question of why, out of all the available celebrities to use, the ones chosen for the ad were two young blonde women who resemble each other only in being currently single and having sexually racy reputations*, and conclude that the ad aims to associate a black man with loose young white women, thus triggering people’s discomfort with interracial sex. The Obama campaign itself, probably conscious that it stands to lose more than it gains by seeing racism in an ambiguous ad image that many people will interpret otherwise, avoids making that connection, and instead responds with a fund raising email criticizing the ad for
… attacking your enthusiasm, comparing me to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, and making false claims about my energy plan.
In a reaction that should be as unsurprising as the suggestion that the ad appeals to racism, other commenters (conservative ones especially, but not only conservatives) suggest that it’s specious to see the ad as racist, that Paris and Britney are simply the obvious choice if you’re looking for vapid celebrities who are famous for being famous, and that seeing racism in their juxtaposition with Obama is paranoia, and perhaps a sign that liberals are themselves uncomfortable with interracial relationships.
I probably should let this pass, in favor of more serious discussion of the candidates’ differences in foreign policy, readiness to handle the economy (a matter on which I think Obama’s way more prepared and informed than McCain), or even offshore oil drilling. But there are a couple of things nagging me about the controversy.
First, thinking it’s a stretch to see an appeal to fears about interracial sex in a brief juxtaposition of images of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears with Obama? OK, fair enough. The ad doesn’t say anything suggesting a sexual connection between them and Obama; it says more that Obama’s like them, so, as far as overt content - maybe a sexist attempt to belittle Obama by comparing him with young women, but not so much a racist appeal to “where da white women.”
But then the hairs on my back go up a bit when some of the same people saying this ignore or dismiss “where da white women” references that aren’t even particularly subtle. There’s a commenter in this thread at Lawyers, Guns, and Money who is having great fun mocking Scott Lemieux and his other commenters for seeing a subtext in this ad of appeal to fears about interracial sex, suggesting they need to be on an anti-psychotic or wear tinfoil hats, but this same commenters starts the thread by saying he thought it was “frivolous” to “pretend” that the “Call Me” ad about Harold Ford was about race. Of which - closing your political ad about a black man by showing a blonde talking about meeting him at a Playboy party and asking him to call her, and running that ad in a Southern state is not an appeal to white fears there? Come on, give me a break.
Similar, though I agree with Ross Douthat over Scott Lemieux on the suggestion that the ad has any serious resemblance to “Triumph of the Will” (not seeing this as a valid criticism, but then, as far as I can tell, only a couple of bloggers are making it), it would be easier to accept his points on the whole “is there a racial subtext in showing Paris and Britney” argument if he hadn’t repeatedly favorably linked and article by Steve Sailer about Obama where that subtext is much more overt. Steve Sailer, you may recall, is a guy who has repeatedly openly argued that black men are genetically predisposed to have bigger penises and lower IQs than white men. And, in his article, he has such points as
Years later, when he’s working on Wall Street, he’s creeped out by his visiting mother’s insistence on seeing her favorite film, the 1959 Brazilian art-house classic “Black Orpheus.” He belatedly realizes that his very fair-skinned mother is sexually attracted to dark men….
and, in a quote from a Rolling Stone article,
What the focus groups his advisers conducted revealed was that Obama’s political career now depends, in some measure, upon a tamer version of this same feeling, on the complicated dynamics of how white women respond to a charismatic black man.
To be sure, Ross Douthat has said that he doesn’t agree with all of Steve Sailer’s points about Obama - and Sailer does make points less overtly racial about the nature of Obama’s charismatic appeal. But Ross has also never said anything to spell out which of Sailer’s points he agrees with and which he disagrees with, so I’m not at all sure he does see any serious taint of racism in his blog friend Steve Sailer.
I really wish I didn’t live in the world where this was true, forty $&@%# years after the Civil Rights Act, but the unease about “how white women respond to a charismatic black man” is out there, is openly remarked on, and has been played to in the recent past rather openly in another political campaign. So, not seeing anything racial in juxtaposing the two young blondes with Obama? That I’ll totally buy. Seeing it as some sort of amazing act of extreme paranoia when other people see such a racial subtext? Um, no, at that point the lady doth protest too much, not buying.
Which brings me back to that bottom of the deck. The McCain campaign is said now to be aggrieved over suggestions that they’re playing to racism.
Before all this happened, McCain advisers believed that the Obama campaign successfully pinned a racist label on Bill Clinton during the during primaries — for comments that drew protests from some leading African American politicians — and were determined not to let the same happen to McCain. Also, they take personally any suggestion from the Obama campaign that they are part of a campaign that would play the race card and are indignant about it.
Hey, guys, if you’re determined not to let the same happen to McCain, if you want to avoid injecting race into the campaign, how about, instead of making silly, clumsy negative ads that don’t well represent what you might find wrong with Obama’s policies or where you might find his record shaky, but do supply vivid images that lend themselves to being interpreted as racial subtext, you review your ads a little better. Is it really that hard to guess that people would be looking extra closely at what kinds of white women’s images you juxtapose with Obama? Is it really that hard to guess that putting his face on Mt. Rushmore and on currency, in an ad, might just raise the question of how his face differs from the faces that are already there? I just don’t see where the McCain campaign is trying oh so hard to avoid that racist label and now is sadly maligned. What I’m seeing, instead, is a campaign that was just waiting, primed and ready for Obama to say anything at all - even a single sentence - that suggests an appeal to race, so it can charge in with that (probably already prepared) “bottom of the deck” remark.
* As a side point, a few people have noted, and I agree, that comparing Paris Hilton with Britney Spears really isn’t fair to Spears - the one is a rich women who became famous mainly for being rich and for a sex tape of herself, while the other worked her way up from a more modest beginning as a musician (whether you personally like her singing or not) and then got unfairly plagued by paparazzi as she slid into mental illness.
